On Thursday, or at the latest, early next week, the prime minister will announce his pick for the top post at the Mossad. It's possible that Netanyahu decided to move up the timing of this announcement because of media pressure, specifically a lead story published this week in Yedioth Ahronot depicting him as a wishy-washy and indecisive leader. But the truth is that, as this story shows, the media are less powerful and resourceful than is commonly thought.

Members of the press have been groping in the dark for bits of information. Nobody knows who will replace Meir Dagan, the current Mossad chief, and before Netanyahu let it be known that the announcement was imminent, nobody had any idea when it would be made.

The rumor mill has been at full tilt for several months. The names of possible candidates have come and gone.

This week Amos Yadlin left his post as head of Military Intelligence, after five years on the job, and his name has come up in media reports as one of the candidates for the top Mossad post.

Yadlin, it appears, has left his IDF intelligence position without knowing whether he is in the running for the Mossad job. Because of an absence of information, journalists (including this writer ) are forced to regurgitate a list of likely candidates that includes: the current head of the Shin Bet Yuval Diskin, "T," who has served twice as deputy head of the Mossad, and perhaps also Hagi Hadas, who was No. 3 at the Mossad during Dagan's tenure and today serves as the prime minister's envoy for negotiations over the release of Gilad Shalit.

The possibility that Netanyahu will bypass this short list and promote some other figure from within the Mossad ranks, or an outsider whose name has not surfaced in this context, cannot be ruled out either.

It's to Netanyahu's credit that the press is groping in the dark for information.

The prime minister will make this decision on his own. Netanyahu is withholding information not only from the press, but even from members of his closed circle of advisers.

Dagan is about to leave his post after more than eight years on the job. The first part of his term was mired in controversy and marred by tense office politics, policy upheavals and the departure of top Mossad officials who could not adjust to his management style.

But after about two years on the job, Dagan learned some lessons and began listening to his associates. Senior Mossad officials persuaded him to scrap some ambitious operational plans that were likely to have ended in major catastrophes.

The moment he found his equilibrium, Dagan flourished in his role. Most importantly, he restored the Mossad's prestige and enhanced its power of deterrence.

Deserving of credit

Several events of strategic import for Israeli security, for which the Mossad and the intelligence community deserves credit, according to foreign sources, happened on his watch.

It was the Mossad, for example, which supplied precise information about Hezbollah's arsenal of long-range missiles, enabling Israel's air force to destroy the missiles in 34 minutes during the Second Lebanon War. It was in 2008, while he was chief, that Hezbollah's "defense minister," Imad Mughniya was knocked off in Damascus. Hezbollah has since been struggling to find a replacement for Mughniya.

And, criticism leveled by reporters and commentators notwithstanding, the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai attributed to Israel was not a failure.

True, Israel's relations with Australia, Britain and Ireland sustained some short-term damage as a result, but Hamas hasn't been able to to find someone to replace al-Mabhouh, both as chief of logistics and as liaison with the ultra-secretive al-Quds force, Iran's Revolutionary Guards. It was also the Mossad, according to foreign sources, that helped obtain information used by the air force when it attacked a convoy trying to smuggle arms to Hamas.

Beyond anything else, though, Dagan's term will be remembered as a time when the Mossad was systematically able to hamper Iran's nuclear efforts, even though the ultimate objective of putting an end to Iran's nuclear ambitions has yet to be fulfilled.

In this context, there couldn't have been better timing for the changing of the guard at the Mossad. With Dagan's replacement about to be named, Iran's nuclear program has suffered a major setback:

In an unprecedented development, uranium enrichment activities at the Natanz plant have been suspended because of malfunctions and damage to the centrifuges.

Whether this was really caused by a computer virus, by faulty equipment sold to Iran by certain organizations, or by a lack of technological virtuosity on the part of Iranian nuclear experts, the widely held assumption is that the Mossad, under Dagan's tutelage, had something to do with it.

Notwithstanding the successes it's notched up, what happened this week far away from Mossad headquarters is cause for concern.Dr. Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear weapons specialist at Stanford University, was invited to visit a North Korean uranium enrichment site and was amazed at what he found.

Within one year, he found, the North Koreans have managed to build a sophisticated facility for uranium enrichment. Advanced P-2 centrifuges, the model that Iran has had difficulty producing, operate at this site.

What guarantee is there that North Korea, which in the past supplied a nuclear reactor to Syria (which was later destroyed by the Israeli air force ) will not supply centrifuges to Teheran?

The lesson from North Korea is clear: When a country is determined to develop nuclear weapons, it will find a way to do so despite international pressure and sanctions and despite a successful Mossad chief.

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India, Pakistan, N. Korea and now Iran. Who else? The technology is out
there and countries will opt to achieve nuclear bomb capability. Of
those who tried in recent times only Iraq and Syria failed. Both were
bombed. Is there any doubt that the Iranian facilioties must be bombed?
N. Korea is tougher because China will object mostly because the trickle
of N. Koreans going into China will become a flood, but the recent
attacks by N. Korea on S. Korea were probably the last straw. The
destruction of their facilities can be done with warning so few lives
will be lost. The message will not be lost on Iran. Mossad has probably
delivered other messages but the Iranians did not get them. I doubt a
new chief would be a better postman.

, because sobiriety is whats called for when dealing with a global,
variegated N. Korean arms export industry (which the IAF already had to
address once in the Syrian desert) and the number of states which do not
wish us well, staffed my men who like to deal in bags of cash, the one
thing the Generals in Pyongyang can't seem to get enough of....How does
this cocktail of factors taste to you? A litle scary, no? Maybe we
should all cut back our liquor consumption like the eternally wise Mark
Lincoln, until the meshugenes in Pyongyang and Tehran are retired.

Israel has no realistic military option against Iran (with US
disapproval), other than a nuclear strike which is unacceptable before
the Iranians have a nuclear weapon and are ready to use it. The distance
to Iranian nuclear installation is bigger than what the roundtrip range
of the most capable Israeli plane can do without midair refueling.
(Where?) The installations are also well dispersed and some locations
may be unknown. Here is a completely different alternative for Israel:
1. Make peace with Syria. The Syrians offered it to Sharon and Netanyahu
(following Hafez Assad strategic decision to make peace with Barak).
Syria at peace will kill Hizballah by depriving them of access to
weapons, and get Meshal and other Palestinian rejectionists out of
there. Cost: The Golan. 2. Make peace with Lebanon. Papa Assad promised
this will follow, and Syria can deliver. No more arms supply to
Hizballah, and it will become a political party. 3. Make peace with the
Palestinians. Abbas wants it, and Fayyad is establishing a state whether
Israel likes it or not. Cost: Practically all the Territories except for
some exchanges. 4. Make peace with all Arab states, as per the Saudi
plan. 5. Iran, having been pushed out of the region, looks elsewhere to
cause trouble. Iraq and Afghanistan will keep them and the US busy.
Israel is no longer of central interest to them.

"With the abandonment of its plutonium program, U.S. officials
claimed North Korea began an enriched uranium program. Pakistan, through
Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, supplied key
technology and information to North Korea in exchange for missile
technology around 1997, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf acknowledged in 2005 that
Khan had provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea." -
Wikipedia// Obviously, North Korea already had knowledge of Uranium
enrichment for over a decade. When did they actually start enrichment?
Since the agreement with the US to freeze their Plutonium program
happened on Oct 1994, they started their enrichment research as soon as
they could, perhaps in 1997. We don't actually KNOW when the program
started, but it could have taken them years to come to this point. If
you are not a paranoid, why believe that the Korean program is in effect
for ONE year only?

I read the latest IAEA report to the Board of Governors on Iran,
GOV/2010/62, yesterday. Before this report, a few weeks before the
report was released the Israeli press was full of ominous and
threatening assertions as to it's contents. GOV/2010/62 reveals that
the Iranian enrichment program blunders on, with poor results and little
progress. An inventory of all Uranium in the Fuel Enrichment Plant at
Natanz was conducted. This included all feed, enriched product, and
tails. The average product has been 3.37% enriched, too low to use for
fuel at Bushehr. This probably explains why six of the plants cascades
have been extended from 164 to 174 cascades. Nothing has changed at the
Pilot Plant since Cascade 6 was coupled to Cascade 1 to recover Uranium
from the tails of Cascade 1. Strong evidence of how inefficient the IR-1
centrifuges are. Production of 20% enriched Uranium remains low. At
the much hyped Fordow *Qom) plant the plans have been revised and
nothing much else is happening with construction ongoing but NO
centrifuges yet installed. Iran has yet to start on the plant that
would be necessary to manufacture fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor.
The report GOV/2010/62, as with it's predecessors, stands as testimony
of just how poorly the Israeli intel services have done in recent years,
and the lack of the usual barrage of hype suggests that the intel
services have decided to stop drawing attention to that fact.

The israeli/Palestinian conflict will only be solved by imposing a
peace treaty followed by disengagement on the U.S. side. It does not
make sense for America to have presence in many Arab countries and be
friend to Israel at the same time. There is something wrong there and
the current administration is getting to recognize it. It is never too
late to disengage from full unquestionable support to Israel. Time has
come for a real change for the sake of Free America.

Sarah Palin went on Glenn Beck and clarified for the world that North
Korea is the Real US Ally. She has to be right. She can see Russia
from her house and everything. Everybody who thinks that the South
matters is just plain mistaken. We have the WORD now from on high -
PALIN & BECK!

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